📖 Stories guide

📜 What's a story?

A story is an adventure that your family plays together out in the world: meet a stranger in a tavern, chase bandits, find clues, make choices, and face a boss at the end.

One person makes the story in the 📖 Story builder. Call them the Dungeon Master (the DM). The DM lays out cards (each card is one thing that happens) and joins them with arrows (what has to happen before what). Then the game puts every card somewhere real in the world: a town, a cave, a forest, a haunted manor.

Open the builder with the 📖 Story button at the top of the game screen. The first time, bubbles show you round. Press 🧭 Tour in the builder to see them again.

🚀 Getting started

There are three easy ways to begin:

1. Play the campaign. Press 📚 Stories and open 📜 The Shattered Crown, a ready-made adventure. Choose its size (1×, 2× or 3× as many cards), press 🔨 Build, then ▶️ Start the story.
2. Let the game draw one. Press 🎲 Randomise, answer a few questions (how long, how hard, battles or mystery, how many branches) and a whole story appears. Change anything you like afterwards.
3. Make your own from scratch. Drag a ⭐ starting card onto the canvas, add more cards, and draw arrows between them.

Give your story a name in the box at the top. It saves by itself as you go.

🃏 The cards

The card list on the left has over 100 cards in groups. Click a group to open it, or type in 🔍 Search. Drag a card onto the canvas, or just click it to drop it in the middle of what you can see. Point at a card to read what it does.

⭐ Starting cards	Every story begins with exactly one. It gathers the family in one place: a plea in the tavern, the notice board, a dying messenger, a town under attack, the king's summons, a mysterious stranger, a road ambush, or waking up in a dungeon.
⚔️ Fight	Battles: bandits, goblins, wolves, skeletons and more.
🧭 Explore	Go somewhere: scout a cave, visit the old mine, cross the wilds.
💬 Talk	Find someone and talk to them. You can write what they say.
🔎 Find	Look for things: clues, lost items, herbs, ore, pearls.
🛡️ Escort & rescue	Keep someone safe, or free prisoners.
🧩 Puzzle & mystery	Levers, riddles, search a room, work out who did it.
🔀 Choice	The family picks a path (see Choices and dice).
👑 Boss fight	A big finish. Bosses are optional: any card can end a story.
🧩 Quest cards	A whole mini-quest in one card (see Quest cards).

Some cards happen in real places: the haunted manor outside Ravenmoor, Deepdelve Mine, Glimmerwater Cave, the bandits' Rookery. When you build, those cards go there.

➡️ Arrows and paths

An arrow means "this happens first". To draw one, drag from the ● dot on the right side of a card to another card.

• A straight line of cards is a simple story: one thing after another.
• Branches: draw two arrows out of one card and the story splits. The family can do both paths, in any order (or split up and do one each).
• Paths meeting: when two arrows go into one card, that card waits until both are done.
• No loops: arrows can't lead back to an earlier card.
• Click an arrow to select it. Press Delete (or 🗑️ Remove arrow) to take it away.

🔀 Choices and 🎲 dice

Choice cards

Draw an arrow from a choice card to each option. When the family gets there, they pick one, and the other paths close. Some choice cards come with ready-made options (like the three doors: gold, silver or wooden). On others you name the options yourself in the card's settings.

Dice cards

Dice cards let a roll decide: a 😊 Charm roll to talk your way past, a 💪 Strength roll to break a gate, a 👁️ Perception or 🤸 Agility roll. They always have exactly two arrows:

• the first arrow you draw is the way if the roll passes ✅
• the second is the way if it fails ❌

Whoever clicks rolls for the family (a d20 plus their quality), and everyone in the story sees the roll.

✏️ Changing a card

Click a card on the canvas. Its settings open in the panel on the right:

• The words. Change what people say, who they are and what the family has to do. Leave an empty line in a long text to start a new page (the family presses Next to read on). ↺ Use the engine's words again puts the original words back.
• ⚖️ How hard (fights and bosses): 🟢 Easier, 🟡 Normal, 🟠 Harder, 🔴 Heroic, or 📖 follow the story's setting. You can even change a fight that the family hasn't reached yet while the story is being played.
• Which boss (boss cards): pick one, or let the engine choose a fitting one.
• The options (choice and dice cards): name each arrow.
• 🗑️ Remove card takes it off the canvas.

Click an empty part of the canvas and the panel shows the story's settings and a quick "How it works".

⚙️ Story settings

Press ⚙️ Settings at the top:

How hard	Easy, Normal, Hard or Heroic: the level of every fight (a card's own setting wins).
Where	Close to home, the region, or across the whole realm: how far from the starting town the cards are spread.
Starting town	Where the story begins, or wherever most of the family is. (A few starting cards always begin in their own town.)
How scary	Spooky or cosy: decides which bosses the engine may pick, and what 🎲 Randomise draws.
Dungeons	On or off: whether cards may go underground.

If a card doesn't fit the settings (a spooky card in a cosy story, say), the ⚙️ button turns orange and tells you which.

🧩 Quest cards

A quest card is a whole mini-quest in one card, with 2 to 4 cards inside: the dragon's egg, the witch's bargain, the heist, the tournament and many more. Some have a choice inside. Join a quest card up with arrows like any other card.

• Click it to see the cards inside. Press 📦 Unpack to put them on the canvas so you can change them.
• Your own stories appear in the quest group too: drop one in and it's played as a quest in the middle of this story.

🔨 Build and ▶️ play

1. When nothing needs fixing, the bar at the bottom turns green: ✅ The story is ready.
2. Press 🔨 Build. The game places every card somewhere real in the world, sets each fight's level so the family grows stronger as they go, and shows on each card where it happens. Press 🗺 Show on map to see them all.
3. Don't like the places? 🔁 Rebuild picks other ones.
4. Press ▶️ Start the story when everyone's ready. Everyone online is brought to where the story begins.

Changed something after building? Build again: the green bar tells you when it's needed.

🎭 While you play

• The story's cards appear in the world, and the compass points the way to the next one, even down into caves and up the stairs.
• Talk to the story's characters with E. Everyone in the story sees what they say.
• Choices and dice rolls pop up for everyone. The first click decides.
• In the builder, the cards light up as you go: ✓ green = done, glowing = happening now, grey = a path not taken.
• ⏸ Pause the story (bottom bar) when it's bedtime. Everything is kept: open the story later and press ▶️ Continue. Or 🔁 Start over from the first card.
• Only one story can be played at a time in your realm.

📚 Your library

Press 📚 Stories to see:

• 📜 Campaigns: ready-made adventures for everyone. Change one and it becomes your own copy (the original stays as it was).
• My stories: everything you've made. ➕ New story starts a fresh one, 📋 makes a copy, 🗑️ deletes.
• 👪 Family shelf: press 👪 Share on one of your stories so the whole family can play it, or copy it to make their own version. Someone else's story can't be changed until you copy it.

🔧 Fixing problems

The bar at the bottom lists what needs fixing before you can build. Click a problem to jump to its card. The usual ones:

• No starting card, or two of them. Every story needs exactly one ⭐ card.
• A card nobody can reach. Draw an arrow into it from another card.
• A loop. An arrow leads back to an earlier card. Remove it.
• A choice with only one option. Choices need two or more arrows out; dice cards need exactly two.
• "The story is being played." Pause it first (bottom bar) to change it.
• "This is someone else's story." Press 📋 Copy to make your own version.

⌨️ Shortcuts

Drag the background	Move around the canvas
Scroll / pinch	Zoom in and out (or the + and − buttons)
⤢ Fit	Show the whole story
Delete	Remove the selected card or arrow
Ctrl + Z	Undo (or ↶ Undo)
🧹 Clear	Empty the whole canvas
🧭 Tour	Show the builder's bubbles again